In his inaugural address Donald Trump channeled an old trope —the forgotten man—although he updated it to “the forgotten men and women.” He asserted that his whole program was for those forgotten by Washington for decades.

But an important portion of the program for helping the forgotten man is in substantial tension with views of the man who originally introduced the phrase into the political lexicon. He was William Graham Sumner, a Yale professor of economics and 19th century classical liberal. For Sumner, the forgotten man was the citizen who was called on to shoulder the burdens of government’s social engineering. Here is Sumner’s most pertinent paragraph on his forgotten man:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X . . . What I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man. . . . He works, he votes, generally he prays—but he always pays.

In his inaugural, Trump was also more explicit about his trade policy than usual: “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” But putting up tariffs to protect industries is an excellent example of how Sumner’s forgotten man is harmed.

Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero to One, is ostensibly a self-help book for those who want to succeed at start-ups. But any powerful self-help book flows from a philosophy of the world, and Thiel reflects his libertarian and transhumanist impulses. Zero to One is thus far more interesting and more original than most business books. But the book is also at times disappointing because, amid arresting insights, it contains overstatements and simplifications. And at the heart of the book is a paradox: Thiel believes that innovation is less than it could be, but he does not offer a convincing explanation of why the market for startups should be failing.

As a counterforce to government intrusions, technological advances have generally promoted liberty. Among the most powerful of these forces is the internet—the medium of this blog. In the book Technologies of Freedom, Ithiel de Sola Pool showed how the printing press was indispensable to the transformation from monarchy to democracy. The printing press was certainly essential to creating a constitutional, continental democracy in the United States, for, as de Tocqueville observed around that time, organization for the public good “cannot be conveniently and habitually done without a newspaper. Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before thousands of readers.” In 1789 the printing press fostered the most widespread deliberation on fundamental law that the world had ever known.

The history of liberty has been in no small measure the struggle between diffuse and encompassing interests, on the one hand, and special interests, on the other. Through their concentrated power, special interests seek to use the state to their benefit, while diffuse interests concern the ordinary citizen or taxpayer, or in William Graham Sumner’s arresting phrase, The Forgotten Man. When the printing press was invented, the most important special interests were primarily the rulers themselves and the aristocrats who supported them. The printing press allowed the middle class to discover and organize around their common interests to sustain a democratic system that limited the exactions of the oligarchs.

Bu the struggle between diffuse and special interests does not disappear with the rise of democracy.

Had Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan managed to win on November 6, Robert Kagan’s The World America Made would have taken on heightened significance. Even in the wake of the Republicans’ defeat, this hawkish historian’s advice to policymakers matters more than we might otherwise suppose. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and co-founder with Irving Kristol of the Project for a New American Century, served on the Romney-Ryan team as a foreign policy adviser, but he also caught Barack Obama’s attention earlier this year. Back in January, President Obama reportedly expressed his admiration for an article Kagan had…

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